Observatories/Astronomical Images/Libraries : Slow reading/seeing as a thing, not as a resource

Astronomical Images/Observatories/Libraries 

To read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers. 

Friedrich Nietzsche

To read is to be attentive to the trace of the other, and this attention takes time. Additionally, and perhaps paradoxically, it calls for an emptying of the self to prepare for the other, abandon that allows the other to gleam.

Slow Philosophy : Why Slow Reading Today? Boulous Walker. 2017

https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/slow-philosophy-reading-against-the-institution/preface-why-slow-reading-today

Celestial Sphere : Stars and Dust Particles

Entanglements of matter and meaning.

Karen Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, 2007.

Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.
Martin Amis, Night Train, 1997.

For Baudrilland the actual photographs are beside the point. 

It is what precedes them that counts in his eyes- the mental event of taking a picture.
Sylvere Lotringer, The Piracy of Art, 2008.

The Library : A Meditation on the Human Condition (Giacometti, artist-philosopher)

Books can step up to us- into us- in many ways.
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich was for me that rare precipitate force which calls another book into being.

Mario Petrucci, Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl.

Observatories : Boundaries/Mapping Spatial Representations

Entanglements of matter and meaning.

Karen Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, 2007.

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad's analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr's philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity. In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of "social" and "natural" agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their "interrelationship." Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler's influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

Norman Lockyer Observatory, Seaton.

Celestial Sphere : Stars and Dust Particles. 

Astronomical archive

Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.
Martin Amis, Night Train, 1997.

For Baudrilland the actual photographs are beside the point. It is what precedes them that counts in his eyes- the mental event of taking a picture.
Sylvere Lotringer, The Piracy of Art, 2008.